Meshed Histories: The Influence of Screen Printing on Social Movements

Just like clothes or cars, media can come in and out of fashion.
Screen printing—or serigraphy, as it's called in finer art
circles—has been a standard commercial process for more than a
century. As a reproduction technique, it has many wonderful
qualities. It requires very little in terms of equipment, and even
that can be easily made by hand; it is easy to teach and to learn;
and it's very well suited to very short runs of large format
objects. It seems like an obvious choice when looking for ways to
create prints for the public. Yet there have been at least two
periods in history when screen printing was “discovered” by
artists—the first was in the United States during the mid-1930s,
under the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration
(FAP/WPA), and the second time during the 1960s.

When Public Art Ruled

Screen print, Illinois FAP/WPA, 1937 (Library of Congress).

Between 1935 and 1943 the FAP/WPA was the first, and so far, the
last, great effort to put public funding into the arts. It was
primarily designed to provide jobs for unemployed artists—at the
beginning, 90 percent of the artists had to come from the relief
rolls. As an important secondary impact it brought art and artists
to the breadth of America. Teaching how to make art was a national
priority, and printmaking was an obvious approach. However,
conventional art techniques such as lithography or engraving posted
pedagogical and technical challenges, and screen printing quickly
emerged as a productive choice.

The Silk Screen Unit of FAP/WPA was created in 1939 to promote
public interest in this new medium. Among the major artists
involved were Elizabeth Olds, Harry Gottleib and Riva Helfond.
Their job was much more than to create a field of work in difficult
times, but also to start a forum for proselytizing about
printmaking as a tool for social democracy. Olds, an advocate for
screen printing, laid out the situation thusly:

Since Currier and Ives there has been no
comparable development… The mass production capacity of these
multiple original works of art in color, with their unique artistic
qualities as pictures… requires a new exhibition and distribution
program in order that this Democratic Art may be made available to
a large audience and buying public.

“The stencil process is an ancient one, as the
authors of this book reveal. The silk-screen stencil, which is the
particular subject of the book, is a modern and, it is claimed,
American development of this process that is of revolutionary
importance. It removes from the craft of stenciling its serious
technical limitations, endows it with the freedom of the artist's
brush or pencil and makes it a medium for the expression of those
subtle values that distinguish what we term Fine Art from its
cruder relative, commercial art. It would be of disservice to my
country not, at this time, to deplore our own national neglect of
our own silk-screen stencil process in this day when nationwide
visual, educational propaganda is a matter of such desperate
necessity.”

The 1960s: Two Revivals

Paris, 1968

Fast-forward thirty years: The United States has emerged from
the Second World War as a global superpower. The Cold War—and its
domestic counterpart, McCarthyism—has forced political activists
into hiding. But the civil rights movement in the South proves to
be a harbinger of things to come, and following 1964's Free Speech
Movement, the gloves are off. All sorts of social change movements
come out of hibernation—antiwar, anti-imperialist, labor, women's
rights, you name it. And their activism requires media. Once again,
art students in schools around the world find that they haven't
been taught a printmaking medium that meets their needs.

Perhaps the iconic representation of 1960s poster making was the
output from various workshops in Paris during the worker-student
strike during the spring of 1968. Art students from several
colleges barricaded themselves in and created hundreds of graphics
that spewed through the streets. But their well-meaning efforts to
turn training to practice fell with a resounding thud.

Poster scholar Gene Marie Tempest interviewed several of the key
participants, and learned that the first poster, Usines,
Universités, Union (“Factories, Universities, Union”), was a
lithograph and it took all afternoon to make 30 copies. This
clearly wouldn't do, and they turned to an “American technique”:
silkscreening. By the mid-1960s only a handful of French galleries
were using it to reproduce artworks.

Artist/activist Guy de Rougemont, who had been a client of one
of those galleries, brought colleague Eric Seydoux, who was
familiar with silkscreening, to the Beaux-Arts school.

“The atelier members,” recalls Rougemont, “were
in their general assembly, and I stood up and said, 'Listen, I have
recently discovered a much faster printing process that is possible
with fewer materials. It's called silkscreening.' So they all
turned towards me and said, 'Very well, you will be responsible for
setting up a silk-screening workshop,' And so I said 'yes,' but I
was thinking 'What a responsibility!' After all, I only had an
amateur's knowledge of the process. So I left the school, and I
just happened to run into Eric. I said this just happened, I agreed
to set up a silk-screening workshop for our painter friends. The
next day Eric and I went to see his boss [at Paris Arts] and he
gave us large screens and some inks. And so with Eric, who knew the
technique very well, […] we arrived at the Beaux-Arts.

Buraglio confirms that ”few people knew the process,“ but this was
not a problem because according to Seydoux ”it was very simple. I
mean, everyone could learn the technique in a little more than a
few minutes.“

Silk-screening was key in both workshops' impressive poster output.
Instead of thirty lithographs a day, the Beaux-Arts silk screening
produced 100 to 200 posters per rig per hour, several thousand per
night, depending on how many screens were in use. The Arts-Déco's
production was more modest: also 100 to 200 posters per hour, but
only two to three hours of printing per night.”

Harvard, Berkeley and beyond, 1969

Almost exactly the same scenario played out as the Harvard
campus erupted over conflicts with the campus administration.
Harvey Hacker, a student at the Graduate School of Design, found
himself drawn into a movement where his skill set was much needed
for publicity work. However, the school still taught classical art
media, and screen-printing was not one of them. When pressed to
crank out some strike posters, including a local version of the
iconic clenched fist, the owner of a local art supply store—who
happened to be a sympathizer from Europe—gladly gave silkscreen
supplies to the ad hoc crew. Their posters and T-shirts quickly
made national news and movement history.

By now, the wonders of this miracle medium were out of the bag,
and activists embraced it with vigor. Here is a testimonial found
in Every Soldier a Shitworker and Every Shitworker a Soldier:
Organizational Skills Handbook, by the International Liberation
School, Berkeley, October 1969:

The primary advantage of silk-screening over
offset printing lies in its inexpensiveness for short runs. Runs of
over 1,000 are more trouble than they're worth with the makeshift
equipment that's available to us. Also, in a crisis situation (just
let your revolutionary fantasies run wild) such as a blackout,
power failure or press rip-off, it will be necessary to be able to
print information, slogans, etc., manually. Since the process is
relatively easy to learn, and the equipment easy to assemble and
much easier to maintain than an offset, it is to our advantage to
familiarize as many people as possible with silkscreening
(revolutionary art springing from the people). Also, in our
attempts to destroy fragmentation and alienation in work, we can
see that a hand-screened poster is really a product of unalienated
labor—there is a tremendous amount of satisfaction to be gotten
from turning out beautiful, hand-done screened political
posters.

Everywhere there was something going on—Mexico City, Boston,
Berlin—tiny workshops cranked out untold numbers of posters and
street graphics. Striking students at San Francisco State College,
People's Park demonstrators in Berkeley, the film institute in
Cuba—all participated in one of the mass unorchestrated effusions
of independent popular visual culture ever seen. And it wasn't
slowing down.

The Legacy

Political art history repeated itself in 1970. The May 4
National Guard killing of four student demonstrators at Kent State,
as well as two students at Jackson State College, in Mississippi,
and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, resulted in massive community
response. Art students all over the country directed their energy
to producing social change posters, and they knew what to do.
The
workshop at the University of California, Berkeley was perhaps
the most prolific, creating more than 400 works on diverse issues
such as gay liberation, health care, opposition to the Vietnam war,
support for political prisoners, demand for alternative educational
models and community control of police. Even though by then some
sympathetic offset print shops existed to do larger runs, the
advantages of silk-screen printing were well known, making it the
medium of choice for countless activist artists. In the mid-1970s,
community-based workshops such as San Francisco's La Raza
Silkscreen and Kearny Street Workshop sprang up. The rise of
movement-friendly offset print shops, along with migration to other
media, eventually dimmed the parade of posters coming out of these
small talleres. But even today, screen-printed posters are
still created at workshops in San Francisco, Chicago, Portland and
Minneapolis. Much of the work is still collaborative and
community-based, as a recent example by Oakland's Jesus Barraza and
Melanie Cervantes demonstrates. Silkscreening may never die, but if
history is any guide, it will probably be forgotten. Here's looking
forward to the next Renaissance.

About the Author: Lincoln Cushing has at various times been a printer, artist, librarian, archivist, and author. At U.C. Berkeley he was the Cataloging and Electronic Outreach Librarian at Bancroft Library and the Electronic Outreach Librarian at the Institute of Industrial Relations. He is involved in numerous efforts to document, catalog, and disseminate oppositional political culture of the late 20th century. His books include Revolucion! Cuban Poster Art (Chronicle Books, 2003), Visions of Peace & Justice: 30 Years of Political Posters from the Archives of Inkworks Press (2007), Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, (Chronicle Books 2007), Agitate! Educate! Organize! - American Labor Graphics (Cornell University Press, 2009) and an illustrated essay in Ten Years That Shook The City — San Francisco 1968-1978 (City Lights Books, 2011); forthcoming is All Of Us Or None — Social Justice Poster Art of the San Francisco Bay Area (Heyday, 2012) based on a remarkable collection at the Oakland Museum of California. See more at his Docs Populi website http://www.docspopuli.org